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Chris Brogan blogged recently about his decision to close his Linkedin account. This got me thinking, yet again, about whether I should do the same.

I have been in Linked in for nine years, having been user number 1400 or so out of 100 million. It is useful for keeping up to date with the people I know's changes of circumstance but little more.

I keep trying to get involved in the various Linkedin groups I am a member of but a few things drive me away.

The first is the interface which throws away nearly thirty years of experience with online forums and either doesn't do, or does badly, most of the basics of online discussions.

The second is the feeling that it is slipping into the Ecademy nightmare of desperate out of work consultants pouncing on corporate folks like piranhas seeing meat. Many otherwise interesting threads end up either spammy or "me too".

Ironically the third thing that drives me away is the thing that I suspect makes it appealing to others. It is too safe and too corporate. It feels bland and lifeless. Despite having no great affection for Facebook I spend more time in there because at least the discussions are more free flowing and lively.

Unlike Chris I am going to keep my account, and make the most of having a self updating address book, but it is a shame it never became more for me.

socialmedia social networks linkedin

Twice a year the heads of BBC’s digital services brief partners and suppliers on how BBC Online and Red Button will work with them in the months ahead. At the broadcaster’s ‘Spring Briefing‘ today the BBC released research on how the UK population interacts with digital media.

The reserach considers digital media interaction, from sharing links and photos to writing blogs. It turns out that the old 1% rule, which said that more people will lurk in a virtual community than actively participate, is old news and that now, more than 10% are getting online to contribute and interact.

The UK is not a wallflower when it comes to online participation, according to the study, 77% of the online population is now active in some way. But that still means that nearly a quarter of the UK are lurkers.

Ease of use, ubiquity of devices and improved user experience is bound to contribute to the amount of people who get online and take part in activities.

Interestingly the BBC’s research says that lurkers are not necessarily people who are digitally illiterate or unable to gain access. The study results say that 11% of passive web consumers today in the UK are early adopters who choose not to participate. Maybe the sheer volume and noise of life online is putting them off.

The study was led by Holly Goodier, Head of Audiences for BBC Future Media who says on the  BBC Internet blog, “Digital participation now is best characterised through the lens of choice. These are the decisions we take about whether, when, with whom and around what, we will participate. Because participation is now much more about who we are, than what we have, or our digital skill.”

The BBC is using this research to create a new model to look at digital activity and is calling it ‘The Participation Choice’.



In the graphic above, ‘initiation’ is distinguished from reaction because it includes activities that are triggers to other people’s participation. So that’s things like uploading photos, starting a discussion and creating groups.

The ‘easy reaction’ group is the closest to passive, they tend to have fewer devices, but they do participate. They respond largely to the activity of others. This includes replying, ‘liking’ and rating, all activities where there’s little effort, exposure or risk.

The Participation Choice is a synthesis of primary and secondary research conducted over the past 18 months. The data published today are all taken from the most recent, large scale survey of 7,500 UK adults – representative of the UK online population.

Social activity and the growth of devices attached to the Internet means that we are changing our habits. It’s not so surprising that the old 1% rule’s time has passed with social media taking up so much room in our lives online.

The BBC has access to a huge audience in order to collect data about user habits. No doubt this research will influence the corporations forthcoming online moves as well as informing others as to how they might harness the latest interaction habits.

socialmedia

WHAT TO TWEET

* Interesting, current links with useful descriptions. The most valuable tweets usually point to fantastic content, with sufficient description for people to know why they should click on it.

* Links to your own content. People like links to content created by the Twitter account owner, which is why they follow them.

* Stimulating questions. People find value in interesting and provocative questions, whether or not they respond on Twitter.

* Occasional unusual or humourous posts. It is good to break up the flow of a Twitter account with funny or different posts, rather than have it be too consistent.

* Responses to others. Twitter is a conversation, so it is important to respond to others, and these can be among the most interesting and informative posts.

WHAT NOT TO TWEET

* Content-free statements. Don’t say things like hello and goodbye, or other interjections that contain no content and add no value.

* Excessive personal updates. Unless your Twitter circle is only close friends, don’t just tweet your day-by-day activities. It is good to share of yourself and the notable things that you experience, just don’t overdo it.

* Negative thoughts. If you’re feeling down, it’s usually better to keep it to yourself. People are attracted to positive attitudes rather than negative ones. Of course, if you do want to reach for connection at a time of need, Twitter can be invaluable.

* Extended conversations with individuals. Anything much more than a couple of to-and-fro tweets is stultifying to everyone else. Move to direct messages or email.

* Old news. Don’t share things that everyone has already seen. If you’ve seen something on the TV news, be sure that everyone on Twitter knew about it a long time ago.

Twitter socialmedia

Management literature typically emphasizes individuals and locates explanatory power in their personal properties. Leaders are the sources of motivation, control and direction. The manager’s perspective is taken for granted as setting the limits of action and what is thought of as right or wrong.

Management theory is based on the same Cartesian assumptions of self as subject, other as object and relationships as influence and manipulation. This is why the present management thinking severely restricts what is thinkable and doable in the world of networks.

The potential of social media cannot be realized without the very different epistemological grounding of the relational perspective. Power in networks is about “power to” or “power with”, and not “power over”. Independently existing people and things become viewed as co-constructed in coordinated networked action.

The emergent pattern changes when the local interactions change. Self-interest in the network economy looks different from self-interest in the market economy. By seeing one’s actions in a network of mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships aiming to enrich the individual and the collective effort, each individual’s success is more likely to be guaranteed.

Cooperation is the new competition.

networks socialmedia complexity management

As business increasingly becomes either knowledge-or service-based, constant communication is necessary for employees to collaborate. Social platforms, or intranets, have emerged as the leading technology for information sharing at companies. Social intranets apply the cross-communication capability familiar to us from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to internal communication and collaboration platforms.

"Social intranets encourage wide authorship and involvement among workers," says Chris McGrath, co-founder and vice-president, sales and marketing, for ThoughtFarmer, a social intranet supplier.

"Social intranets address pains such as poor communication, poor collaboration, employees not feeling 'connected' to head office, multiple and conflicting sources of information, and employees not feeling like they're being listened to or valued."

Social intranets do more than create happier employees. A Gallup survey of data from 152 companies showed significant differences between highly engaged and less engaged workforces. Companies with engaged workgroups scored better in productivity, profit-ability, safety incidents and absentee-ism, and had 3.9 times greater earnings per share growth.

socialmedia sociallearning collaboration

"Presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. This was tons of fun to present. I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. "

socialmedia

Twitter is an online social networking tool in which users post 140 character updates of what is going on in their lives along with links to things they think are interesting, funny, or useful to their followers (“following” being essentially what “friending” is on other sites). People use twitter in many ways, some as a newsfeed by following prominent people or networks, some as a pseudo-chatroom by limiting their followers and whom they follow to close friends and family, and some as a microblog for updating people about the work they are doing and their personal lives.

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I don’t know if this is significant, but I think it might be. The other evening as my tech head teenage son, Luke, drove me home after work, he announced that he’s off Facebook.  I’ve been “Facebook” sober for ten days,” he said proudly.
“Why now?”  I asked.
He mentioned that he’d seen some Youtube videos recently that pointed out while you’re spending all your time on Facebook you’re missing out on a lot of real activities. It also is a lot of “me, me, me,” he added. “And that got me thinking.”

facebook socialmedia

Twitter Pros

Easy to navigate and update, link to and promote anything
Reach far beyond your inner circle of friends
One feed pools all users; anyone can follow anyone else unless blocked
Pure communication tool, rapid responsiveness
You don’t have to be logged in to get updates; you can just use an RSS reader
Very interactive, extensible messaging platform with open APIs
Many other applications being developed (Twitterific, Summize, Twhirl, etc.)
Potential SMS text messaging revenue from wireless networks (although Twitter states they are not currently getting any cut)
Potential future advertising and/or enterprise subscription-based revenue streams
With its “thin” overhead, Twitter is probably more scalable than Facebook, giving it a cost advantage
Twitter Cons

Limited functionality; find people, send brief messages, direct replies
Limited to 140 characters per update
Not all people find it immediately useful
Over-emphasis on follower counts
Easily abused for spam and increasing the noise level
Relatively smaller installed user base
As yet no readily apparent monetization strategy
Facebook Pros

Application mashup; find people, make connections, email, instant messaging, image/video sharing, etc.
Most people can quickly grasp the value of connecting with friends, family and established contacts; some people report they use Facebook instead of email and IM
More emphasis on deep connections with others vs. who has the most connections
“True Friends” feature increases your transparency to selected connections; almost like having private and public profiles
Huge, rapidly growing installed user base
Inherit stickiness, third party applications, “gift giving” and personal data collection make Facebook a powerful advertising platform
Facebook Cons

More difficult to navigate and update
Requires investment of time to realize sustained benefit
Opt in model requires a user to allow others to connect
Less immediate responses; unless you stay logged on continually
Overhead of mashup and “thick” applications could limit scalability, bloat cost structure

facebook Twitter socialmedia

Note - Facebook is not the Internet

Today, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled “Facebook: Actions,” a dramatic overhaul of the now ubiquitous ”like” button, which users click to indicate anything from “I agree with this op ed” to “I have laughed, just now, out loud,” to “I have just clicked the like button on facebook.com.”

Now, “like” will be broken up into a number of different actions like “own,” “watched,” or basically any verb that can be recorded, cross checked and stored in a database.

facebook socialmedia

Before I get into specific examples and illustrations of where I think the list fails, let me give you four basic problems I have with it as it stands today:

1. Many of the examples on it could potentially show positive ROI but – as presented – only reference selective gains from social activity and not actual, factual, empirical ROI. If that made no sense, that’s okay. Let me explain:

For something to be ROI, you need two ingredients: The cost of the activity and the gain from that activity. (That cost is the investment. The gain is either revenue or cost savings.) It’s math. Really really really simple math. ROI is an equation and it generally looks like this:

($ Gain – $ Cost) ÷ $ Cost = ROI

or

($ Revenue – $ Investment) ÷ $ Investment = ROI

(You can also multiply the result by 100 to get yourself out of the decimals, but that’s a personal choice. You can do that in your head.)

Anything that isn’t the result of the ROI equation is not ROI.

Note that a gain is just a gain,like cost is just a cost. Neither gain nor cost is ROI on its own. Ever. Not in any known universe.

Put another way, bread and ham  may individually be part of the ham sandwich equation but ham alone is not a ham sandwich. Ham is just ham. The problem we face today: This list pretty much mistakes ham for a ham sandwich. Good thing it was free or we would all be asking for a refund (or a word with the chef).

ROI socialmedia socbiz

twitter socialmedia

The Internet is full of fakes. Specifically, fake profiles of people using fake names.
While some are people with real opinions who just want to be anonymous, these fake profiles are increasingly part of organized, for-pay efforts that hire people to create accounts under false names and use those accounts to post positive or negative online reviews, push a company brand or political message or make an online site look popular.
The challenge for companies is that the issue is big, and it’s only going to get worse.
According the November 2011 paper “Serf and Turf: Crowdturfing for Fun and Profit,” by researchers in the department of computer science at the University of California Santa Barbara, “campaigns on these systems are highly effective at reaching users, and their continuing growth poses a concrete threat to online communities such as social networks, both in the US and elsewhere.”
The term “crowdturfing” is a new one. It’s a combination of “crowd sourcing” (using the brainpower of the masses to help with a task) and “astroturfing” (informational campaigns that look like grassroots efforts but really are sponsored by organizations).

socialmedia

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has touted Google+ not as a “social network” but an “identity service.” With Search Plus, not only will our identity be reduced to a name and photo, as 4chan founder Chris “Moot” Poole brilliantly argued in October, but through Google+, we will effectively be applying SEO (search engine optimization) principles to ourselves. It’s happening already.

Scripting News’ Dave Winer, among others, thinks this is more or less just deserts for Twitter. Twitter has little room to complain about Google, Winer argues, after trying a similar kind of vertical integration by moving into and largely taking over the Twitter client business. And Facebook is even less likely to draw sympathy from advocates for the open web.

Still, this potentially marks a real transformation to the way we have looked for information on the web, one with real winners and losers. It also signals a real danger to the balance of power between users and megacompanies. We are increasingly moving from a bottom-up web, where users vote with their links, keyboards and their clicks to show what’s relevant to them, to a top-down web where that’s doubly or triply mediated by browsers, search engines and social networks.

This could be how the web dies: not with a sudden migration to bespoke client apps, but by drifting into a silo so big that most of us don’t even notice that anything has changed at all.

socialmedia business

A few years ago, I put together a list of social media marketing examples. The list contains 324 examples of brands putting social media to use and at that point in the social media industry's evolution, it was the best of what was around (and still might be).

Now that initiatives have been in market, any reasonable business manager would expect to see program results. However, quantified results in social business and brands willing to stand behind them are difficult to find. But the truth is out there...

...and here are 101 examples of social business return on investment, roughly 60% revenue generation and 40% cost reduction. Each example lists brand, activity, and source + year.

ROI socialmedia socbiz

The case for enterprise social software is so obvious to me that I tell other CEOs their only choice is when they are going to adopt it. Nearly 800 million people in the world use social networking software. Are you going to go where your customers are, where your employees are? Or are you just going to ignore it?

One of the many reasons you don’t want to ignore it involves the problem I mentioned at the start of this post. Every organization has hidden pools of talent; people who can make important contributions that might be unrelated to their job descriptions. This hit home for me last year, when we took one of the biggest steps a company could take, and decided to change our name.

The “safe” thing to do in a situation like this is to spend a few hundred thousand dollars hiring an outside “specialist.” Well, I know my people, and I know they are every bit as creative as anyone at any other company. Besides, the high-priced naming agency would do the same thing I would do: Go around asking employees if they had any bright ideas.

socbiz socialmedia leadership

Andy said the social media behind the firewall is not an application that people should be required to use such as a payroll system. You need an culture of opt in. He added that you cannot measure value of social media by counting stuff. ROI is not the issue. Make sure you are measuring the right thing. It is change in performance. Measure outcomes. They needed a difference type of performance at Lowe’s and social media enabled it. Companies who are successful will not look at social media as an IT project, but a business project. You will not get 100% engagement but they do have 90% participation at Lowe’s.

socialmedia ROI

Companies are improving their mastery of social technologies, using them to enhance operations and exploit new market opportunities—key findings of our fifth annual survey on these tools and technologies, in which we asked more than 4,200 global executives how organizations deploy them and the benefits they confer.1 When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share, respondents say, confirming last year’s survey results.

socialmedia ROI AZ_share

In March 2009, a group of Federal employees from the USDA Graduate School’s (now the Graduate School USA) Executive Potential Program released a report titled, More Than Just a Slick Website: The Use of Collaborative Technology to Solve Organizational Challenges in Federal Agencies. The report was based on a survey of collaboration practitioners who had launched initiatives documented by Collaboration Project case studies.

government socialmedia

As social media evolves as sector we are starting to see some great case studies emerge around the world and we wanted to pick 50 of the best and share them here for you to enjoy. We’ve focused in on the big social media areas of Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, mobile and Blogging so as you can drill down in to the area that suits you best. There is a good mixture here of case studies for both smaller businesses and large brands so sit back and start reading and learning from these 50 great social media case studies…

socialmedia